Bruce Jay Nelson

Bruce Jay Nelson (January 19, 1952 - September 19, 1999) was an American computer scientist who, while pursuing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and working at Xerox PARC, developed the concept of the remote procedure call together with Andrew Birrell, described in their 1984 paper Implementing Remote Procedure Calls that became a landmark of distributed systems research. Nelson graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1974 and earned a master's degree from Stanford in 1976 before completing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1982, and he later became chief science officer at Cisco Systems in 1996, a position he held until his death in 1999.